Doom as a tool for system administration (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

cs.unm.edu

250 pointsColinWright31 comments

Hah, I remember this. My favorite thing about it is the fact that vital processes could end up killing each other and crash your system.

To me, that takes this from stupid, to gloriously stupid.

So wonderful - includes features that sound eminently sensible yet are not present (I imagine) in any modern tools:

> A new sysadmin can be given less power by providing her with a smaller weapon. A rank beginner may not be given a weapon at all and be forced to attack processes with her bare hands. It would take a foolhardy player to attack a room full of monsters, just as a newbie should not kill a bunch of important processes. A more experienced sysadmin would have time to stop a newbie who is trying to kill the wrong process. The real work could be left to those with the big guns. The truly great sysadmins could have BFGs.

Ha, I'm old. I remember seeing this when it originally showed up on shashdot.

Same here. It was the dawn of the dial-up age, and we were loading funky IPX device drivers and stringing coax to play this between apartments...

Yeah, me too :-)

Small nitpick: this was not the dawn of the dial-up age. This was the end of 1999. I had been dialing up for at least 5 years at this point and I'm sure there where many who had it before me.

I'm a child of the early eighties. I cannot recall a time that there was not a functioning 1200 baud (or faster) modem in our house.

I got my first modem (without direct Internet access, only BIX and a Vax at college) in 1992.

Must have been nice. In '82 I got a third-party 600 baud (nonstandard, can't recall the brand) modem which was better than 300 and Atari hadn't come out with a 1200 yet.

Depends. On 1999 I joined my second ISP, and in Portugal that's when we hit the mainstream.

I'm pretty sure 1999 was towards the end of the dialup age, even if that's a bit of a nitpick.

> Certain processes are vital to the computer's operation and should not be killed. For example, after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and my session was abruptly terminated.

My favourite part

From the same person: Adaptive Radio

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/radio/index.html

> It can be hard to listen to music in the office. ... Adaptive Radio is an alternative approach in which users just indicate what songs they don't want to listen to, and the system will try to play MP3s that are not disliked by anyone.

Such a cool idea in principle... I would be the party pooper who blacklists everything though. I just can‘t concentrate with music playing, which is kind of funny, because construction noice, for example, does not nearly distract me as much.

I don't mind music for work, as long as it is without lyrics. But i can't filter out the lyrics while trying to process some kind of writing in from of me.

I bet you would like techno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMIvj7Zxogs

Or maybe chillhop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Y8JkHcI3I&index=1&list=PLR...

Give each of those 5 minutes, you may be able to settle into a nice coding groove. I sleep like a baby to the 1st one.

Note that in lots of countries if you play music "publicly" in the office then you theoretically need a license for the office, but everyone listening individually does not.

(If you are ever cold called by the PRS, never say you play music in the office!)

subsequent art:

- Dockercraft: https://github.com/docker/dockercraft

- Kubecraft (K8s), a fork of Dockercraft: https://github.com/stevesloka/kubecraft

- Docker DOOM: https://gideonred.com/dockerdoom/

I wonder if there are more such things. Not necessarily for controlling, I can think of a couple games that would be a great fit for just visualizing stuff. Trains for I/o, you can vary number of trains, train length and speed to represent parameters of the io pattern.

Check out Logstalgia: http://logstalgia.io/

Imagine the multiplayer version showing you all the other sysadmins or devs entering the same room to check for logs etc as a problem is being debugged. "Hey dude, look at this log!" and there goes the command for a tail or grep...

This is refreshingly hilarious. I must admit, using a sawed-off shotgun for resource management even merely inside a single process already holds a massive amount of attraction for me. With my track record in C and assembly, I would be licensed to the most devastating weaponry. So many IT roles underestimate the importance of good entertainment.

Once again, whimsy turns to wisdom when least expected. The very idea is ludicrous, but the hurdles and lessons learned while trying to be funny are real. Good read!

Early Gamification.

Similar solutions were also mentioned in "Ready Player One".

I'd love to see more applications of this applied to the more tedious and boring aspects of system administration.

Bubblefishymon. Not a game, but it gives funny but very functional visual appearance to system/memory load, which helps a lot to get the system status. I think discovered it in the late 90s or early 2k as a couple Windowmaker dockapps which later merged into a single one which was also ported to Gkrellm, and still use it under Xfce. http://pigeond.net/bfm/

Ahhh ... the good old days before money got in the way

I was pondering flow charts as a superior way to visualize a programs uhh flow (compared to text)

Then it struck me that humans have amazing spatial memory. The hypothesis is this: A 3d representation (if done right) should make familiarizing the human with some code a process of minutes rather than hours or days.

The PsDoom version that is linked to on the page doesn't work.

Here's an actively maintained fork: https://github.com/orsonteodoro/psdoom-ng1

Many previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Doom%20as%20a%20tool%20for%20s...

And these days "we" manage containers in Minecraft...

Awesome! I Love it

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